Guide · updated 12 Oct 2026

Apple Health export to CSV: the honest route to a spreadsheet

You did the right thing: Health → your picture → Export All Health Data, waited out the spinner, and got export.zip. You open it expecting numbers you can put in Excel or Sheets, and find export.xml — a single file of hundreds of megabytes that no spreadsheet will open. This guide covers why Apple ships your history that way, what your options actually are for getting it as CSV, and a route that converts it in your browser without uploading your health data to anyone.

Why there is no CSV in the zip

The export is a machine copy of the HealthKit store, not a report. Every measurement — every step sample, every night’s sleep stage, every heart-rate reading — is one <Record> element inside export.xml, with its type, value, unit, start and end dates and the device that measured it. A history of a few years is hundreds of thousands of these elements, which is why the file is enormous and why Numbers or Excel chokes on it. Apple offers no CSV option anywhere in the export flow — the zip is the whole menu.

That is also why the file is worth converting properly rather than hacking apart: the XML keeps which device measured each value, something a flattened spreadsheet usually throws away. If you ever wear more than one device, that column is the difference between one history and a double-counted mess.

Your options, honestly ranked

Web converters that upload your file. Several sites will take export.xml and return CSVs. Read what you are handing over: your complete health history leaves your device and lands on a stranger’s server. We think a decade of heart rate and sleep is a bad price for a spreadsheet.
Scripts and GitHub converters. Real tools exist, and they respect your privacy — but you will install a runtime, pick a repo and debug whatever the last maintainer left. If you are comfortable there, you are also comfortable with the option below run locally.
In your browser, nothing uploaded. The Soundings importer parses the same zip in a worker inside your browser tab — no network request ever carries your data — and a Download as CSV button turns the result into spreadsheet files. No account, free, open source.

The browser route, step by step

Open the importer (any browser, Windows or Mac or the phone you exported on) and drop export.zip on the page — unopened. It reads the XML locally, shows live row counts, and draws the whole history as one timeline. Then:

Click Download as CSV. You get one zip with signals.csv (every measurement), activities.csv (every workout) and composites.csv (vendor score summaries), when each is non-empty.
Each file is long format — one row per measurement, ISO timestamps — with columns for concept, value, source device and the export it came from. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets; it is built for pivot tables and charts.
Or feed the same values onward: the sibling Download my store button gives the same data as JSONL plus a manifest that the open-source MCP server from @alumeet/longitude reads, so an agent like Claude can query every year of it.

The same importer also converts Garmin, Withings and Oura exports to the same CSVs — drop each vendor’s file on its own visit and the sources sit side by side on the timeline, never merged.

What the CSV lets you see

Questions a half-million-row spreadsheet earns, that the Health app charts cannot:

Pivot resting heart rate by month across every year you have owned the watch.
Scatter sleep duration against next-day step count, a decade at a glance.
Chart body weight with each data point colored by the scale or watch that measured it.
Find the gaps — weeks Health never recorded — because absent rows are visible, not averaged over.

Every number in the CSVs came out of the zip that never left your device — nothing was uploaded to get there.

Soundings is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is also why this guide stays link-honest: every claim above points at Apple’s own documentation, at our code, or at behavior you can verify on the page itself.